Dreading Doomsday

by Glenn Diaz

Whether it’s a rogue, uncontrollable virus that wipes out the human race or a robot prototype that gains consciousness and mounts a rebellion against their human masters, technology often enters our consciousness when we imagine the end of the world. Even the once very real threat of a nuclear apocalypse, while also ideological, is at its core a technological occasion, the result of a chilling arms race that could have easily obliterated a vast majority of the human population.

In hindsight, it seems natural for technology, as the hallmark of human civilization, to be invoked when we talk about its demise. Technology is intertwined with mankind’s history: from the quaint stone tools used in hunter-gatherer societies to the steam engine that ushered in industrialization, from the Sony Walkman that heralded individual alienation to the touch-screen technology that supposedly supplants a real human caress.

These shifts in definitive technologies echo shifts in human thought and relationships in society – from primitive communalism to feudalism, from capitalism to its advanced, multifarious definitions – indicative of how technology shapes history and, to a certain extent, vice versa.

And so when a society is deemed “advanced,” what is often implied is that that it has made leaps in the way it is able to harness nature to suit its needs. Human agency is key in the way we imagine the future (or non-future) of the human race, and unbridled excess and wanton insatiability – both in conceiving new inventions and harnessing resources – always spell disaster.

The portrayal of technology in apocalyptic scenarios therefore highlights its double-edged quality: that it can nurture but also annihilate. And since we are at a point in human history when advancements in science is fastest and most pronounced, the imperative of caution is also loudest.

Unfortunately, technology is also a very profitable venture. The biggest firms today – from Facebook to Apple, from pharmaceuticals to energy companies – all partake in the hefty technological pie. As a result, what was once a hallmark of the greatness of the human imagination has been transformed into a commodity. What was once a showcase of the great human spirit is today just another manifestation of an entrenched inequality as some can afford it more than others.

Excess, then, exists beyond the normal doomsayers’ sounding board of environmental degradation and religious fanaticism. Even technology, with its imaginative zeal and purportedly apolitical rendering, is susceptible to the most basic of human natures: greed, and it is a tendency that could very well take us to the end of the world as we know it.

We need not look into the future. In 1986, a nuclear accident in a Ukraine facility in Chernobyl released fatal radioactive material that affected almost the whole of Europe. Just last year, what is now called the Great East Japan Earthquake caused a number of nuclear accidents, including meltdowns in its Fukushima complex, near which hundreds of thousands were evacuated.

When we speak of 2012 then, the threat seems to come not from an ancient calendar or from malevolent robots from outer space; not from a wayward asteroid or a new strain of bacteria that is resistant to all known antibiotics. The threat comes from here and now, in the way technology is used or, more often than not, misused.●

Waiting for the End

by Toni Antiporda

“But of that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father alone.” – Matthew 24:36

We’re always thinking about the end.

Our little lives are yet to begin, but we already find ourselves pondering about death and about the various ways that we as a humanity could go. Without the knowledge of how it all ends, our little lives are rendered devoid of purpose, bereft of meaning.

We’re so preoccupied with the end that we even have developed it into a discipline: eschatology, that study of the final events of history and the ultimate destiny of humanity. It concerns the four last things: death, judgment, heaven and hell. Religion plays with this precarious urge to know how it ends, by treating heaven as a commodity to sell and hell as an immediate threat.

For thousands of years, even before the Mayan calendar has been a part of our consciousness, religious sacred texts and folklore have prophesied about the end of days, filling the minds of the faithful with images of worldwide famine, ground-shattering tremors and rivers of fire surfacing on the earth, all serving as mere precursors to the coming of a great Messiah.

Contemporary apocalyptic imagination rests heavily on the idea of destruction and pandemonium. Beyond the overt imagery of devastation and chaos fed by the mass media, religious leaders themselves further the confusion of their flock, with factions still existing even among the faithful. Via their fervent speeches on the pulpit, citing current world and regional wars, natural disasters and famine as signs of the end, they instill unwarranted fear in the hearts of believers.

As our history shows, nothing pushes people more into blind obedience than fear. In truth, Christianity has been introduced into our country by way of fear. Spanish conquistadors and friars easily instilled unquestioning subservience to our newly Christianized ancestors by constantly bringing up images of a fiery hell and inciting eternal damnation on their minds.

After 400 years, the same tactics remain. Modern charismatic televangelists mesh natural and man-made incidents with biblical posturings to paint a truth of the prophecies slowly materializing. Their constant call to seek for salvation, repentance and forgiveness often entails, if not a steady stream of donation to the local parish, constant policing of the flock.

Religious violence still has its roots in apocalyptic imagination and theology. Prevailing images of warring nations and a crumbling earth all but makes us fear the apocalypse. But, if Scripture is still to be believed, Revelation 21 tells us that we’ll see “a new heaven and a new earth,” for the first heaven and the first earth would pass away. At its core, the apocalypse is really about new creation, transformation, and change – an old world paving the way for a new kingdom.

If the apocalypse could be seen in this light, not only would it quell our fears, but it would also demystify our religious institutions and deflate our very human arrogance.

Perhaps we’ll never cease on thinking about the end. Even after 2012, there would be another set of dates marking the supposed end of the world. We still look to it with uncertainty. For it is possible that there is no salvation and no damnation in the end. Just a void, and nothingness.●